Aperture 3 users reporting serious memory leak issues

Aperture 3 was a much needed update to Apple’s professional photography suite, which had lagged badly behind the competition not just in feature-set, but in performance, since its predecessor did not take advantage of 64-bit processors.

Unfortunately, though, the upgrade has not resulted in measurable performance gains for most users. Far from it: a bug in Aperture 3 causes a serious memory leak on the machines of many users, filling up even terrabyte sized hard drives with bloated caches of unused virtual memory.

Apple has already patched Aperture 3 once, with a 65 meg software update meant to address “an issue affecting the playback of video clips used in Aperture 3 slideshows on Snow Leopard.” Unfortunately, that’s the most minor of bugs compared to the memory leaks now being widely reported.

On their part, Cupertino is staying mum, per usual. That hopefully means they are aware of the issue and have the Aperture team working overtime on a fix.

DON'T MISS
Apple Releases Aperture 3.1.2 Update, Here’s What It Fixes

Anyone using Aperture 3 out there who has experienced the memory leaks? Let us know in the comments. This isn’t a universal problem, so clearly it has something to do with the end user’s machine configuration. Maybe we can figure out the common factor.

68 comments »

About the author

John Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

(sorry, you need Javascript to see this e-mail address)| Read more posts by John Brownlee.

Posted in News, Software |

Brent
Aperture is almost unusable on my brand new 27″ imac 2.8 quad core with 8 GB ram. Use a brush and aperture eats up all available ram and is then not responding.
http://www.flickr.com/gramana Pea G.
As a professional photographer, I can’t get any work done in Aperture 3 without it crashing or freezing (once a day on the good days). Getting ready to start a support group website where we can all upload our error messages and mourn together…
I can’t believe Apple released this program from Beta without addressing this issue!
http://www.mimandhoney.com Annie
Aperture 3 is a joke. Hands down the worst software purchase I have ever made. Every issue mentioned above, I too have experienced.
http://www.mimandhoney.com Annie
I will say that Apple has been incredibly accommodating trying to help me resolve my Aperture issues. If/ when I get to the bottom of them I will share what I’ve learned!
Trevor
I just recently bought a MBP specifically for organizing and minor editing of my photos and at first was very impressed with the organizational capabilities of Aperture 3 and like the ease of simple edits I could do within the program. Unfortunately it fails practically everyday.
I am only running a 13.3 MBP with 4 GB ram (Aperture 3.03) but I am not rendering video nor am I overloading by moving or importing/exportings tons of photos, my entire library is like 24GB and just want to make a slideshow for my sisters wedding with about 50 MB of pics. I’d use iPhoto which doesn’t have this problem but there is basically no control over the slideshow in that program. There is absolutely no way this should be a problem…perhaps I should’ve stuck with W*nd*ws???
Gary
Aperture 3 locks up after just a few minutes of performing simple tasks. I’m running a brand new 17″ MacBook Pro with 8gb Ram…no excuses.
I’ll be returning this software!
Kenneth McDonald
I bought Aperture 3 thinking “it is apple so it will be STABLE in use with iPhoto”. BIG MISTAKE! It appears we can no longer trust Apple. The file I loaded vanished out of it and it asked me to search my computer for it or use it “empty”. So did I buy7 this to load my files over and over again every time I open it? NO THANKS.
When I put large information PNG files so many at a time into it (say 10 MB per picture) it speckled and streak the transparent part, leading me to worry that they had become corrupted and might “collapse” later after editing and become useless. I can do without concerns like that.
I was not warned there is an Apple NO RETURNS policy on opened software by the staff member who sold me it, and it DOES NOT SAY THAT on the packaging. DO MORE ROOM HERE! DO NOT BUY THIS TRASH!!!!
Liam
Yeah, Aperture 3 has gone to shit in the last few weeks for me as well.
Apple, fix this fucking shit, you assholes!
Thomas
27″ iMac, Quad Core, 8GB Memory, Intel Core i5, Processor Speed 2.8 GHz
Aperture 3.0.3
Program is forever getting hung up in processing mode. “Faces” is turned off.
Why is it that Apple refuses to anounce this program has serious problems?
http://www.phillipnorman.com Phil
fyi
I get the same VM memory problem on my new iMac and I have never even run Aperture!
VM currently sitting at 144GB+, the Genius Bar said re-installing OS would fix it, it did not!
My problem has been with Photoshop CS5 doing stitching large panos and everything else on the system becoming ‘virtually’ uselessly slow.
10.6.4 – 2.93 Ghz Intel Quad Core i7 – 12GB 1333 MHz DDR3
http://www.finestreetphotography.com Gabriel Morosan
I’m running an Mac PRO with 32 gb of ram …. I get the same problems like everyone else ….. I have to work with 1000′s of images weekly and is a nightmare. I have to restart my machine al least 20, 30 times a day.
Abigal
I had issues also with ram. Had to turn the preview image quality down and it helped immensely with the excruciating hang-ups.
My biggest beef? How the heck is a photographer suppose to save files to DVD’s (say for a customer) without “exporting” saving files to desktop or elsewhere (HUGE MEMORY HOG for today’s 18+ megapixel cameras).
Second biggest beef? Facebook sharing sucks. Should be able to have a WATERMARK preference for sharing images on facebook. No professional photographer would share photos on facebook without adding watermarks. Yes, Aperture has a watermark function, but AGAIN you must EXPORT the photo to apply the watermark (again saving secondary files somewhere on your hard drive and then importing into Facebook through the browser). So basically, the facebook shortcut on Aperture is useless for photographers wanting watermarks.
These are simple but HUGELY annoying issues.
Come on APPLE, we normally love your stuff. This is a great idea, but make it better than other options out there!
Samnavon
I don’t have much to contribute, but anything may help: Aperature freezes upon opening (“processing”) and needs to be force quitted. I circumvented the problem by downloading a trial version of the software and activating it using my current product code. That worked for about 6 weeks, now same problem.
In the absence of a fix where are people turning? Photoshop elements vs. iphoto?
Guest
Isn’t Adobe Lightroom the main competition for Aperture? Photoshop Elements is a wholly different type of program although photo manipulation is a key part of both products to widely varying degrees.
Bokapella
I’m using Aperture 3 and it makes my computer run so slowly when it’s open. It also freezes up and shuts down by itself a lot, which is very frustrating since it’s usually when I’m in the middle of editing.
Guest
I have been experiencing these problems since the advent of Aperture 3, but it was more intermittent until I installed the update. The update causes this to happen every time I open aperture and editing is a joke. I have to wait so long before I can load plug ins or even edit in Photoshop and this is when the system doesn’t crash on its own which it does very frequently. I’ve tried everything from deleting the plist, to deleting the app completely and reinstalling and it is a constant source of frustration. The more frustrating component is that Apple remains silent and doesn’t even acknowledge the issue for its user base. Communication is key with any customer loyalty programs and Mac users are very loyal, but this lack of communication and addressing issues with Apple has been a constant issue in many different applications as well as hardware issues. I think that the memory leak issues are associated to the hardware memory leaks on certain models of laptop running snow leopard, but I have been unsuccessful in finding the appropriate combination to resolve it.
Markus Maleek
We noticed a problem where Aperture hung while cropping the first time we used it after installing Flip4Mac. We hadn’t noticed any other problems after installing Flip4Mac. But it was the only thing that had changed on the machine that we could think of. So we uninstalled Flip4Mac and shut down Aperture and then re-started Aperture. We didn’t even reboot the machine but Aperture seems to be working now.